YourTube

Michigan's Underground Filmmakers Struggle for Community

Brown asked that I refer to him as thechrisbrown - "Lowercase, all one word" - a decision possibly inspired by a recent crash course in self-promotion. His video short Jesus Rises - a mock trailer in which The Last Supper descends into zombie carnage - recently screened at the SXSW Music Festival and even garnered a favorable mention from influential webzine Ain't It Cool News as a result. For Rises, Brown and collaborator Brandon White used only a $100 digital camera and about a dozen friends. "It came together amazing," he says. "For the intestines we just used hog casings and Jello. The peasant boy who gets eaten, this 13-year-old kid, is stuffing pig intestines while we're off setting up other scenes. Everybody, for whatever reason, really believed in it."

Brown hopes YourTube, with its welcoming open-mic format ("As long as it's on a DVD, we'll play it"), can fulfill a much-needed role for fledgling Detroit-area filmmakers. "I would like to build a community," he says. "It's disconnected. Sure there's the Mitten Movie Project. And they've done a great job at getting themselves out front. But there are a lot of other filmmakers that don't have a budget."

The Mitten Movie Project was created in '04 by Thought Collide, a production collective "interested in making a difference in Detroit," and the team behind the locally produced film serial InZer0. On the first Tuesday of the month they screen Michigan-connected films at the Royal Oak Main Art Theatre. Founder Jamie Sonderman agrees the Detroit film set is a culture wheel in need of a hub. "I just got a call from David Mims," he says, referring to the producer behind 313, a movie about Detroit, made in Detroit that recently secured distribution. "And he's all about, 'Let's create a unified front.' And that's the intention behind the Mitten Movie Project."

Brett Pierce is part of a small corps of Detroit expats climbing their way up the Los Angeles film chain. After co-directing two features locally with his brother Drew and a crew of their childhood pals, he decided he had taken it as far as he could in Michigan. "I was really lucky to come up with a group of friends with the same dream who all worked on each other's stuff. But outside of that, there just wasn't much." A few years ago the Pierces headed west and before long they were eking out a small place in the industry (Brett as a production assistant on such modern classics as Hostel and The Dukes of Hazard II; Drew as an animator for the recently-revived Futurama). But a labor of love has recently brought them back home. When a Hollywood production house green-lit them to make Deadheads - a road trip comedy about two amnesiac zombies - then folded mid-development, the Pierces were crushed but eventually resurrected the project, raising new money themselves and opting to shoot in cost-effective Michigan.

I ask Pierce why horror seems to be the genre of choice for so many many up-and-comers. "You can always get more attention with it," he says. His father, who did special effects for Evil Dead, told Pierce he wanted to start in comedy but switched to horror to make the most of limited resources. "It doesn't have to have somebody famous," Pierce says. "As long as people think they're going to see something scary or shocking, nobody cares who's in it."

Ryan Meade agrees. His sophomore film, Ruthless: An Experiment in Terror, premiered last October at the Birmingham Maple. Meade adds that horror, for all its kitsch, is a veritable filmmaking 101 because it covers many of the modern basics, like action and special effects. "Horror means you can do anything," he says, citing Sam Raimi, Peter Jackson and Robert Rodriguez as directors who started out in shock before going mainstream.

Brown screens two gore-sprayed trailers for Ruthless before putting in Dan Poole's cult classic The Green Goblin's Last Stand. The no-budget early-'90s Spider Man saga began as a demo reel for the aspiring stuntman and graduated into an obsession for Poole as Hollywood failed to produce the real thing and his homemade experiments became an end in themselves. The DVD won't read though, so Brown decides to show the Goblin making-of featurette instead, which keeps skipping. Both the malfunction and Poole's story seem funnily appropriate. I can't help but think of Mark Borchardt, the subject of the documentary American Movie, in which the heavily mulleted and eerily un-self-aware auteur presses on making his redneck epic in the face of common sense. American Movie's genius is in how it doesn't let you know whether to laugh at Borchardt or envy his passion. And tonight there's a little of Borchardt's ethic in everybody I talk to.

Brown believes the advents of YouTube and accessible home-editing software have broken the possibilities wide-open for anybody who is strong of spirit but weak of wallet. "Any filmmaker can do anything and get it seen. Our goal is to make the best films we can so that at some point we can say to people, this is what we're capable of with no money."